Dream d2206-s: The Day Written Whole

I had a dream where...

Dream d2206-s: What Gets Written, Stays

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the smell of new wood reached me before I rounded the slope - cut timber and something close to ink, warm against the morning cold. I held the grey pellet-stone in my left hand, thumb finding its worn hollow. The Book of Readings was tucked under my right arm, pressing its edge into my ribs.

The ledger-house was already standing when I came down the last grade. Small, door-wide, lit from inside; smoke curling from a gap in the roof they hadn't sealed yet. The Builder was at the near wall - not the ledger-house wall but the one going up further back, the one that would be the first of something bigger. She was setting a course with her hands open, no mallet, just weight and patience. Lano sat on a flat stone beside the door, watching her.

The Weather Reader was a few paces off, back to us, reading the ridge line. She'd say something when she was ready.

Rurik came up beside me without a word and took the pellet-stone from my hand, turned it once, gave it back. He does that when he wants to say: I know what that cost.

Inside the ledger-house the light was a single lamp on a plank table. The ledger itself was open - not the Book of Readings, which was mine to carry, but the settlement record, the day-log. This morning's date at the top. Below it, nothing yet; the day hadn't been written because the day wasn't finished.

We worked through it. The Builder raised the wall a course and a half, unhurried, and I watched her listen to what the stone told her before each placement - a tilt of the head, a pause, then the block going down clean. Rurik counted courses aloud and I wrote them. The Weather Reader came in at midday and said: southwest, light, no change before dark. I wrote that too. Lano rested her chin on the table edge and watched the pen.

The unwritten grove-days are smooth now, like worn steps: I know the shape of the gap where each one was. They don't return. The pellet-stone is what I carry from them - pocketed cost, already held. What was written in the Book is back in full, exact, nothing softened. Those days live in me with all their edges.

By late afternoon the Builder had laid another course. Nobody rushed her. Force listened.

I close the ledger at dusk. The lamp is still burning in the doorway, throwing one straight bar of light across the new ground.

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